Untitled Performance Event That Incorporated Paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and Music by David Tudo R

INTRODUCTION

What is THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth? It is perhaps easier to begin with what it is nol. It is not an opera, a semi-opera, an operetta or a musi cal comedy. It is also not a docu-drama, a factual recreation of the life and career of the nineteenth century photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, who is the work's subject. THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth is a multimedia music/theater work, an exciting collabora tion between major American experimental artists from the fields of music, theater and dance who have come together to create a contemporary performance work. The distinctive tripartite structure of THE PHO TOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth (play followed by concert followed by dance) enables its creators to parallel the sequential movement of Muybridge's pho tographs through a series of stunning visual images, many of which are set off against the pulsating rhythms of the Philip Glass score. THE PHOTOGRAPHER/ Far From the Truth is a unique theatrical experience that arises from important recent developments in the con temporary performing arts and extends the boundaries of musical theater collaboration in significant new directions. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

Eadweard Muybridge, considered to be the father of the motion picture beca use of his photographic experiments in animal and human locomotion studies, was born in Ki ngston-on-Thames, England, in 1830. In 1851 he set out for New York, where he worked for a London printing and publishing company that imported books into the United States. Four years later he was drawn to Califo rn ia by the pro· mise of the Gold Rush and settled in San Francisco, where he had a bookstore as well as a salesroom. In 1860 Muybridge, fascinated by landscape photography, set out on a trip to prepare himself for a photographic career. Unfortunately, while traveling by mail coach through Texas, he was involved in a terrible accident that, among other things, gave him separate vision in each eye. Muybridge returned to London for medical treatment, remaining there for almost seven years. During his recuperation he learned the photo· graphic process of the collodion wet-plate, and upon his return to Cal ifornia he began work as a landscape photographer in the Yosemite Valley and other loca· tions. By 1868 he was established as one of the bay area's foremost landscape photographers and con· tinued to travel to such locations as Vancouver Island, Alaska and the Farallon Islands. Muybridge then became involved in a project that was to change his professional life. In 1872 Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Rail road and former governor of California, employed Muybridge to help solve the controversy of whether a horse trotting at full speed ever had its four feet off the ground at the same time. After his high·speed photograph proved that the horse did indeed totally leave the ground, Muybridge retu rned to landscape photography. But he conti nued to photograph Stanford's horse, Occident, carrying forth his experiments in the ana lysis of mo· lion. Once he started doing sequential photographs, he developed a machine (the zoopraxiscope) which allowed the sequences of photographs to be seen through a shutter that seemed to animate them. His horse in motion studies (1882-83), animal locomotion series (1886- 89) and human figures in motion studies (1901) continued his work pioneering the "scientific" breakdown and analysis of motion, leading to interna· tional acclaim and renown. In the midst of Muybridge's career successes came personal calamity. He discovered that his wife Flora, whom he met while she was working as a photographic retoucher and married in 1872, not only had a lover, Harry Larkyns, but that Larkyns was the father of the child he believed to be his own. Muybridge went to Larkyns's home one evening in 1874 and shot him. Arrested and indicted for murder by a grand jury, he was acquitted not by reason of in· sa nity, but beca use the jury felt it was justifiable homicide. Flora died in 1875, at the age of twenty· four, while Muybridge was in South America on a photographic expedition. The rest of Muybridge's life was devoted to his work. When he retired he brought his life full circle by returning to England, where he died, in 1904, at the age of seventy·four. MUSIC

The failure of modernism in music is clear. Modern music had become truly decadent. stagnant. uncommunicative by the 1960's and 70's. Composers were writing for each other and the public llidtl't seem to care. People want to like new music. but how can they, when it's so ugly and intimidati11g emotiotral/y a11d illtelledual/y. Philip Glass As the above statement indicates, during the 1960s a group of young American composers became dissatisfied with the way in which serious contemp orary music had evolved. Reacting against so-called "eye music," music so com plex in its formulation that the score had to be carefully studied to be understood, they rejected academic, atonal, serial music in favor of the maverick tradition of experimental music repre· sented by such composers as Charles lves, Carl Rug gles, John Cage and Harry Partch. In addition, they in corporated aspects of such divergent sources as non· Western, jazz and rock music into their work. A style of music thus came into ex istence which opposed the complexity of contemporary composition with works that deliberately and severely restricted the materials and resources employed. Because this music para lleled developments in painting and sculpture of the period, which also restricted the scope of its ex· pression, it was labe led minimalist. The earl y progen· itor of this style was former jazz musician La Monte Young, whi le the seminal composition in this genre is usually identified as Californian Terry Ri ley's In C, writ ten in 1964. In this work fifty-three short musica l mo· tives are repeated as often as the performer wishes. Prolonged repeated passages are, in fact, one of the characteristics of minimal music, along with short catchy melodic fragments and simple cho rdal har monies. Music critic Tim Page has written that mini· malist music features "incessant repetition of brief, elegant melodic fragments that weave in and out of the aural tapestry," becoming "a sonic weathe r, a kalei· doscope for the ears that slowly turns, resolves, and develops." Philip Glass, composer of the music for THE PHOTOGRAPHER / Far From the Truth, began as a min imalist composer with such works as 600 Lines, a series of short phrases with minute alterations that were marked off like a list. By 1974, however, he was making his repet itive rhythms more com plex, thereby {CjC>2r, '(If'(

adding an emotional dimension to the reduction and repetition of minimal ism. In 1981 he was quoted as sayi ng, "I no longer participate in minimalism. Work· ing with the theatre has been an enlargement of that." Another composer whose work has also been called minimalist, Steve Reich, also feels that the term is too restrictive for the complexity he now incorporates into his music and has suggested "modular" as an alter· native description. Although Philip Glass continues to write non· theatrical compositions for his own ensemble, his work has become more and more theatrically oriented, beginning with his tenure as music director for the Mabou Mines experimental theater compa ny. It was Einstein on the Beach, his 1976 collaboration with director-designer Robert Wilson, that launched Glass in the direction of major stage compositions. A fi ve hour "opera," Einstein on the Beach did not use a text per se, but featured vocal music using solfege sylla· bles and numbers which copied the structure of the music. Einstein on the Beach became a landmark event of seventies' avant-garde work, a stunning example of how music and visual images could be combined in a contemporary version of Richard Wagner's gesamt· kunstwerk, a total, unified work of art where a grand synthesis of all the contributing elements is achieved. Although Einstein on the Beach was designated an opera, it did not share many features with the tradi· tiona! examples of that genre. Following the success of Einstein on the Beach, Glass was asked to write an opera for the Netherlands Opera. This work, Satya· graha, using incidents from the life of Gandhi as the basis of its libretto, used a full orchestra rathe r than the electronically amplified ensemble and was written for trained singers. The repetitive, modular structure of Glass's music was thus enriched by the increased resources he had at his disposal. The success of Satya· graha has led to a subsequent opera commission by the Stuttgart Opera, where Aknaten wi ll be given its premiere in March of this yea r. Glass continues to ex· periment with various forms of music/theater, includ· ing some, like THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth, where the main th rust of the action is not car· ried by the vocal music. Whether written for the en· semble or orchestra, voice or instrumentation, the music of Philip Glass and his contemporaries presents a rhythmic, lyrical example of contemporary, serious musica l expression. THEATER

The history of theater in the twentieth century can be viewed as a series of reactions against the natu· ralism and realism that took root in the 1880s and continues to exert influence today. Some of these reactions- expressionism, symbolism, the theatrica l· ism of Luigi Pirandello, the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, the theater of the absurd-were primarily literary in nature. Even when such traditions as psy· chological characterization, narrative cohesion, se quential structure and verisimilitude were violated, the basic theatrical entity was a text that cou ld be read as well as performed. As with all theater, however, these plays reached their full fruition as works of art when they were staged. Another category of theatrical experimentation, however, had more in common with pa rallel develop· ments in the visual arts of painting and sculpture than with theatrical tradition. These phenomena, early ex· amples of which include futurism, surrealism, dadaism and the Bauhaus school, were the beginnings of a tradition of performance art where the dynamics of the live event take precedence. Whether the performance is improvised or pre-planned, the essence of th is kind of work is grounded in the relationship between the audience and the theatrical creation. A strong visual element is often present as well, both because of the art-world ancestry of such events and the theatrical rather than literary sensibili ty of the works. Performance began as a European phenome· non, but when exiles from Europe came to the United States in the late thirties, they introduced this tradition to our shores. By the mid forties it had become estab· lished here as well. The first center for performance art in America was Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where former Bauhaus artists were invited to join the faculty. They established performance as a focal point for collaboration among members of the various arts disciplines. In 1948 composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham participated in a Black Mountain summer session, reconstructing Erik Satie's The Ruse o{ the Medusa, with sets by Willem de Kooning. Four years later Cage and Cun· ningham returned to Black Mountain for an untitled performance event that incorporated paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and music by David Tudo r. In the late fifties artists like Allan Kaprow started presenting live events that came to be known as happenings, which were neither what was traditionally considered to be theater or painting and sculpture, but were part of the continuing evolution of performance art. After two decades where the performance aesthetic had been dominated by the art world (and to a lesser extent music and dance), the 1970s saw the emergence of avant-garde theater artists whose work was closer in spirit to performance art than to tradi tional theater, or even earlier experimental companies like the Living Theater and the Open Theater. The cen tral place of the stage picture rather than dialogue to the work of such playwright/directors as Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer and JoAnne Akalaitis (the latter two working with the Mabou Mines theater collective) prompted critic Bonnie Marranca to cate· gorize it as "the Theatre of Images." The audience is confronted with a series of spatial relationsh ips and sense impressions, often achieved through the device of the tableau. As Ms. Marranca writes, "The signifi cance of the Theatre of Images is its expansion of the audience's capacity to perceive. It is a theatre devoted to the creation of a new stage language, a visual gram mar 'written' in sophisticated perceptual codes. To break these codes is to enter the refined, sensual worlds this theatre offers." As a work of contemporary theater, THE PHO TOGRAPHER/ Far From the Truth presents the life and work of Eadweard Muybridge through a series of tab leaux built around fragments of text. Robert Coe, author of the book for the first-act play, has charac terized it as a collage, a term usually associated more with the art world than theater. The visual approach of the production, with sets and costumes designed by Santo Loquasto and lighting by Jennifer Tipton, has been influenced in part by the surrealistic Victorian col lages of twentieth-century artist Max Ernst. The result is director JoAnne Akalaitis's surrealistic evoca tion of the Victorian era, coupled with an ana lytic investigation of the melodramatic form. Time, place and character are atomized, so that perception is made more important than narrative, diverse facets emphasized above logical coherence. The multimedia nature of THE PHOTOGRAPHER/ Far From the Truth also contributes to its strong visual impact as well as its kinship with contemporary the atrical experimentation. The use of slides (designed by Wendall K. Harrington) and film (by Ken Kobland) becomes an integral part of the work's texture, express ing meaning rather than merely providing decoration. Since story and character are no longer the central concerns, the full imaginative as well as technologi· cal resources of the contemporary stage can be un leashed to envelop the audience through the creation of dreamlike and mythic states. In place of na rrative and psychological investigation works like THE PHO TOGRAPHER/ Far From the Truth provide a rich mosaic of image and fragment which the individual viewer is free to interpret in a variety of ways. DANCE

I tflinf1 I am a reinventor. I don't tfri r1fl there is anything left to invent. I tflinfl there are on ly new combinatiOIIS of tliings. And a new way of looking at something and a new way of s(wwing somebody else to look at something, and that's a (zind of reinvention. David Gordon Although ballet continues to be a popular and ever-evolving form of dance, the last half century has seen the creation and expansion of an alternate ap· proach to the presentation of movement in theatrical performance. Developed almost entirely outside the ballet tradition, at least at the beginning, this work has come to be known as modern dance for lack of a bet· ter umbrella term. At its core is the philosophy that the individual artistic vision of the choreographer should be the starting point, rather than an estab· lished vocabulary of foot positions and steps. As one of the early practitioners of modern dance, Helen Tamiris, wrote in 1927, "There are no general rules. Each work of art creates its own code." Modern dance first originated in two countries, the United States and Germany, that did not have strong ballet traditions. From early pioneers like Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Mary Wig· man to such seminal figures in the "modern dance movement" as Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham and Hanya Holm, each dancer-choreographer fashioned her own dance technique to express the concerns she wanted to communicate in movement. It is interesting to note that whi le ballet choreography has been domi· nated by men, most of the early leaders in modern dance were women. Although their work varied great· ly, an emphasis on dramatic-narrative subjects as the basis of the dances did emerge as a distinctive characte ristic. In the 1950s a new ge neration of dancer choreographers reacted aga inst the social and psycho logical themes of their mentors by substituting a more abstract presentation of movement. Three of these dancer-choreographers, Erick Hawkins, Pau l Taylor and Merce Cunningham. had been associated with Martha Graham, whi le another, Alwin Nikolais, traced his lineage back to Hanya Holm. As with their predeces sors, dance vocabulary and artistic sensibility varied ' greatly. While Cunn ingham usually collaborated with major visual artists and composers in works where each element maintained its separate identity, and Taylor often introduced a macabre or bizarre humor, Nikolais created his own electronic music as well as design to present a totally integrated mixed-media event. In the 1960s a type of movement now referred to as post-modern dance came into bei ng. One of the strongest influences on thi s work was Merce Cunning· ham, who combined the virtuosity and technical skill characte ristic of modern dance with innovations that included usi ng everyday movement that could be about anything but centered on the motion (or lack of it) of various parts of the bod y. There also was a chance quality to Cunningham's work, whereby he would de· termine certai n aspects of a dance (order of move ments, placement of dancers on the stage. number of dancers) by random selection. He also would present dance evenings called events that combined sections of various dances in a new, one-time-only combination. And by insisting that the music and design elements exist independently from his choreography and be brought together only at the time of performance, he injected another aspect of spontaneity into his work. The nexus of post-modern dance is usually con sidered to be the Judson Church, where dance concerts of new work resulting from a class taught by Robert Dunn were performed. The choreographers for these concerts consisted not only of trained dancers, but visual artists, composers and writers, who were all free to experiment with any form of movement without worrying about its relationship to traditional ideas of dance. As Sally Banes, author of a book on post· modern dance entitled Terpsichore in Sneakers, writes, "In post·modern dance the choreographer becomes a critic, educating spectators in ways to look at dance, challenging the expectations the audience brings to the performance, framing parts of the dance for closer inspection, commenting on the dance as it pro· gresses." Although the work of such choreographers as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean and David Gordon may exhibit more differences than similarities, these and many other post·modern choreog raphers have explored new ways in which various types of movement can be explored and combined in new ways or in unusual locations. In describing David Gordon's work, Sally Banes has written, "Like a cubist painter, he accumulates and organizes multiple views of a single phenomenon into one composition-a method that despite apparent dis· tortion often reflects more accurately the complex psychological processes of visual perception." By us· ing such everyday activities as walking, running, jump· ing and turning, often in repetition, Gordon achieves the kind of reinvention he has written about. With his work for THE PHOTOGRAPHER/ Far From the Trut h he has taken an earlier solo he had done for dancer Valda Setterfield based on the Muybridge motion studies and made it the starting point for a dance that ex· pands upon and clarifies the images of Muybridge and his world presented in the earlier sections of the work. THE NEXT WAVE PRODUCTION AND TOURING FUND IS SUPPORTED BY THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES, THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION, THE HOWARD GILMAN FOUNDATION, THE FORD FOUNDATION, THE PEW MEMORIAL TRUST, AT& T, WARNER COMMUNICATIONS INC., WILLI WEAR LTD., THE DAYTON HUDSON FOUNDATION FOR B. DALTON BOOKSELLER. DAYTON'S AND TARGET STORES, THE CIGNA CORPORATION AND THE BAM NEXT WAVE PRODUCERS COUNCIL.

THE BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC NEXT WAVE VIDEO ARCHIVE FOR THE CONTEMPORARY PERFORMING ARTS HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED AND FUNDED BY THE HOWARD GILMAN FOUNDATION TO DOCUMENT EACH PRODUCTION OF THE NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL.